China and the future of the Internet
- Michael Fertik is the founder and CEO of Reputation.com, an online privacy and reputation management company. He is a member of the World Economic Forum Agenda Council on Internet Security and recipient of the WEF Technology Pioneer 2011 Award. The opinions expressed are his own. -
China’s Internet is, in fact, the world’s largest intranet. This is not news to anyone who follows technology in the Middle Kingdom. The Chinese government doesn’t make any real attempt to hide its complete control over what happens behind the Great Firewall. The regime is open about its intent to ensure what it calls “harmony,” which more or less means that it will squelch civil debate that moves beyond a certain pitch or further than a few degrees off the median line. As China’s power grows online and offline, these patterns, taken together with the Chinese government’s technical sophistication, will be of fundamental importance to the overlap between digital freedom and privacy.
The Chinese play hard. They mean to keep their intranet secure and the integrity of their “harmonious” public web discourse intact. They do not hesitate to use their considerable technical prowess to spy on machines that are operated on their network. As a friend of mine in U.S. intelligence circles says without hesitation, “If you go to China, there is a 100 percent chance that your equipment will be compromised.” Earlier this week here at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, I met a successful civil activist who routinely visits China for her work, and she casually reported a recent office visit from Chinese state security services who evinced specific and sweeping knowledge of her emails, calendar, and other information she keeps exclusively on her computer.
Astonishingly, despite its stated objectives of harmony and control, the Chinese have allowed or even encouraged an exploding Internet economy in their country. Of course, the user-generated web — comprised of online publishing tools, self-propelled video sites, and social media tools — is a potential powder keg for a government that cherishes conformity in its national conversation. But the Chinese government has adapted skillfully to the risks. They still sometimes resort to simple shutdown of antagonistic URLs. But their methods have become much more nuanced and powerful in recent years. They have effectively co-opted the power of user-generated content and distribution publication for their own interests.
Leaders of Chinese online media and commerce companies, including ones that have already gone public or filed for IPO in the U.S., have been fairly open about their relationships with their government. They describe the regime’s remarkably frank point of view: we want you to succeed, but not at the expense of harmony. In practice, that means that, if you play ball with Beijing’s running rules — if, for example, you remove user-generated content that criticizes the government’s response to an earthquake — you can survive and even become a billionaire. If not, you’d better move to the U.S. and try your business model again.
China is similarly aggressive in the rapidly emerging field of cyber warfare. A WEF person close to the issue told me that the IRS sustains thousands of cyber attack attempts every year from Chinese computers. This is a common topic among American government and business officials. I’m guessing that it’s similar in other Western countries. So far, the Chinese have taken cyber war more seriously than the rest of us.
At the WEF, China’s command-and-control regime is the elephant in many rooms. Participants see the situation clearly. They talk candidly about the challenges to shared values of privacy and freedom posed by the Chinese government’s approach to the Internet, as well as the emerging power of Chinese cyber-warfare tools. At the same time, the economic potential of doing business in and with China can be overwhelmingly alluring. How do you take a stand against the dragon when it will also buy a billion units of anything you can send it? It’s a hard question, and a sense of fear, opportunity, and optimism pervade discussions about China.
Tablets take over the world, one Davos at a time
This time last year, the online team here in Davos broke off from its coverage of the WEF for an hour or so to follow another Reuters live event – the unveiling of Apple’s iPad.
Back then, there were many gaps in our knowledge of what the iPad could do. We didn’t even know what it would be called.
What a difference a year makes. Now the device, and other tablet computers, is on show everywhere, especially among the gathering of the global elite in Davos. Reuters technology correspondent Kenneth Li wrote yesterday in this article that: “Those discussing the “Shared Norms for the New Reality” in Davos this week need only look around them to see one such ‘reality’: low-cost smart devices are sweeping away clunky old computers throughout the political and business world.”
Kenneth also tweeted this yesterday: “Davos is ugly with iPads. One CEO tried to hide his from me. Shameful!”
One Davos participant not hiding his tablet from view is Russian President Dmitry Medvedev (an avid user of Twitter). Here’s a great picture of him going over the text of his opening address to this year’s WEF meeting in Davos, delivered yesterday evening.
(Picture taken January 26, 2011. REUTERS/Dmitry Astakhov/RIA Novosti/Kremlin)
Cybersecurity goes prime time at Davos
- Michael Fertik is the founder and CEO of Reputation.com, an online privacy and reputation management company. He is a member of the World Economic Forum Agenda Council on Internet Security and recipient of the WEF Technology Pioneer 2011 Award. The opinions expressed are his own. -
The World Economic Forum (WEF) has named cybersecurity one of the top five risks in the world. In its Global Risks 2011 report, the WEF’s Risk Response Network nominated cybersecurity alongside planetary risks posed by demography, resource scarcity, trepidation about globalization, and, of course, WMDs. This is heady stuff. Cybersecurity has officially gone prime time. This week in Davos, I’ll be moderating and contributing to panel sessions on this topic.
The timing could not be more ripe. Right now we are witnessing the convergence of multiple seismic risks to data integrity. Social networks capture and mine ever larger amounts of data about humans and companies, opting users into increasingly invasive data collection with little or no notice. Apps operating on social networks and smartphones continually pull data streams about friends, families, personal connections, contacts, geo-location, behavior, preferences, tastes, and health habits — even when these data streams are unrelated to the stated purpose of the applications.
We’ve seen search sites mine public data, semi-public data, purchased information that was supposedly private, and even scraped or stolen data, and aggregate them together for sale and resale on the open web, claiming cover of current law. To date, the Internet economy has been nearly perfectly stacked against individuals’ control over their data. The proliferation of deep digital information about every individual on earth, along with the correlated explosion of its easy and unwitting accessibility by third parties, poses a “personal WikiLeaks” threat to each of us.
That brings us to Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks, which is itself the subject of at least one session at Davos this year. Reviled by some and relished by others, WikiLeaks represents either “radical transparency” or “radical invasion,” depending on your point of view. A large and growing raft of self-described “whistleblower safe harbors” pervade the Web, enabling and encouraging publication of confidential information that is difficult to authenticate as true or false. I suppose I was nonplussed by the bulk of the content published on WikiLeaks about American foreign policy — I think it’s fairly awesome that the United States is secretly saying pretty much the same exact things it says publicly.
But many people can agree that, when it comes to difficult questions of diplomacy, the ultimate resolution may be greatly benefited by the comfort of each party to talk freely within itself or with others when behind closed doors. The brilliant sunlight of transparency may be just the medicine needed to remedy a public lie, as in the case of the Pentagon Papers, but it may also turn from “transparency” to murkier “invasion” when it comes to secrets of hard-won technical innovation such as an automaker’s hybrid engine code base or a nation-state’s schematic for a particularly nasty weapon.
Indeed, states and non-state actors alike are taking note of the evident power of cyber tools to advance their often alarming aims. Cyber-warfare and cyber-terrorism are now the single most efficient ways to damage sworn enemies. Just as the most enterprising criminal networks have decided to abandon old-fashioned thuggery in favor of more profitable cyber crimes such as VAT fraud and identity theft, states and terrorists have taken to the Internet to realize the maximum possible benefits of asymmetrical warfare. A few smart people can infiltrate financial systems, transportation networks, energy grids, and key commercial installations to steal information, seize control of operating systems, or shut down critical infrastructure. Software engineers are now, pound for pound, the most valuable weapons in a military arsenal.
It is heartening to see this sort of open organizing going on in the face of new and evolving global threats. Regarding the four categories of digital security which you name, in particular numbers 3) malware, and 4) exfiltration (a.k.a.cyberwarfare and cyber espionage), we would like to suggest that attention be paid to Voice-over Internet Protocol (VoIP) which we believe to be a serious but as yet unrecognized vector for future security risks of worldwide proportions. Internet telephony is exposed to all the risks of the Internet. As the usage of VoIP expands, one of its greatest risks is that those of malicious intent will not only be able to disrupt our Internet communications, they will be able to shut down our telephone communications as well, leaving us with no effective means of communications at all. If this were to happen, and it very well could, segments of our economy, indeed our whole country would be paralyzed. This worrisome possibility elevates VoIP to one of the most critical cyber-security threats, and a top level Homeland Security risk.
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Resident Davos Expert
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specific and sweeping knowledge of her emails?
Not so different than our CIA, NSA, FBI right now as all of our telecommunication companies are under their thumbs.